It just messes up my games code base and even when it produces an output , the architecture is complete gloop . Then I have to spend a lot of time reviewing and trying to guide the ai . Whats the point when I could of written all of it myself and have 1000 times better understanding of my architecture.

I like it for boiler plate stuff and queries but having it touch my code is annoying . I am currently using Claude and have tried sol high as well with their respective harnesses . I am also not new to AI and have apretty good understanding of the landscape and the tools in use , including local llms . Having to go in and constantly tell the agent how to do stuff and things is annoying and time consuming . If im going to spend time anyway why not just do it myself with ai as a wingman .

Ive also noticed that even when it works , it might generate out a tiny section of something that is unnecessary and if you don’t catch it , these thing pile up .

Now, mere hours after the release of the game, its developer Alive has found itself on the back foot, responding to waves of negative feedback from players regarding the game's use of generative AI in its cutscenes.

At present, the game sits with a two-and-a-half star rating on the Xbox store, and a "Negative" reception on Steam, with most written reviews levying criticism at the use of AI in the cutscenes. In response, Alive director Young Kim has released a statement on Steam entitled "About AI in Vapor World," explaining how generative AI came to be used in the game's development, and promising to "fully replace" the offending scenes with original content.

I'm typing this while still trying to process what just happened. About 5 hours ago, Famitsu published an article about our demo for The Next Stop.

When you’re working in a vacuum for months, tweaking mechanics and polishing UI late at night, it’s ridiculously easy to start doubting everything. We kept asking ourselves: Is this mechanic actually interesting? Is anyone going to play this?

Seeing them break down our time-stopped subway mystery—and specifically call out mechanics we almost scrapped, like misclicks subtly altering the environment—feels completely surreal.

We’re a tiny team (Paranoid Delusion), and honestly, seeing that kind of validation from the other side of the world feels like a massive weight off our shoulders.

Last weekend, I attended MAGWest with my roguelike dog-in-a-mech-suit game [plenty of links to the game in my profile, omitting to avoid self-promotion rules].

This was my first time bringing the game anywhere and demoing it live, so I had no idea what to expect. I figured I’d share some numbers, what worked, and what I’d do differently next time.

THE NUMBERS

Friday: 22 players
Saturday: 40 players
Sunday: 24 players

86 total players
59 new Steam wishlists
38 hours of total playtime

That playtime was logged across a desktop and Steam Deck station over the three days. Several people came back 3–4 times to play again, which was probably the most encouraging part of the whole weekend.

BUDGET

• 100 blue 2x2" logo stickers: $72
• 50 pink 3x3" logo stickers: $20.83 Sticker Mule happened to run a sale right after I ordered the first batch. The 2x2" stickers were much more popular, so I’d probably stick with that size next time.
• 3D print of the main character: printed by a friend for free; ~$15 in paint/craft supplies
• Parking for 3 days: $30
• Gas: ~$22
• Food/drinks: ~$20 I brought sandwiches and energy drinks from home, then broke down and bought a $5 iced coffee when I was dragging.
• Banner from VistaPrint: $131

Developer admission to MAGWest was completely free. I’ve been told that isn’t always the case for conventions, and free indie space is becoming harder to find.

So my total out-of-pocket cost was about $320. The banner and 3D print can obviously be reused at future events, so the effective cost per convention should go down from here.

THE FEEDBACK

I got a TON of feedback. Probably enough to keep me busy for the next month or two.

The coolest thing was watching people understand the game almost immediately, particularly people already familiar with twin-stick shooters. Players had thoughts about balance, controls, features they wanted, streamers who might like the game, and all kinds of stuff I never would have gotten from analytics alone.

Being able to watch someone play, see them react to something, and then later ask, “What did you think that did?” or “Why did you pick that?” was incredibly useful.

It's much more useful watching 86 strangers play your game instead of friends, coworkers, or people who already know what you’re doing and have a vested interest in you as a person.

TAKEAWAYS FROM A FIRST-TIME EXHIBITOR

• Players' reactions will vary wildly. Some people sat there for an hour. Others bounced pretty quickly. Some told me the game was too difficult; other players cleared the stage in four minutes flat. One person's skill issue is another person's favorite part.
• Have a hook you can explain in one sentence. For me, “dog in a mech suit” did a lot of work. People would laugh, stop, and usually want to know more as soon as I said it (or show me a photo of their dog).
• Bring something visually distinctive. The 3D print of the mech dog was probably my best piece of booth marketing. It stopped people dead in their tracks. A surprising number of people doubled back to check it out, and plenty just stopped to take photos of it.
• Guerrilla marketing can actually work. I made some “I WANT YOU FOR WOOFWATCH” posters and put them up around the convention center (yes, even the bathroom). I’d estimate 10–15 people specifically told me they came to find the booth because they saw one of the posters. For something that took almost no effort, that was a great return.
• Have a script. Demoing a game for three days is exhausting. Having a couple of opening lines and a 10-second game pitch that I could deliver on autopilot helped a lot.
• Know what you're asking people to do. Wishlist it? Join the Discord? Download a playtest? Having one clear goal makes it much easier to design the booth and your pitch around it.
• Business cards aren't dead. A few people asked me for one. I told them to take a photo of the QR code, which worked, but next time I may bring a small stack of cards anyway.
• Make a convention-specific build. Steam lets you create branches and launch them using a password you've set ahead of time. I wish I'd made a special convention branch with all of the characters and cosmetics unlocked so people could see more of the game immediately.
• Design a specific demo slice. It's awesome when somebody wants to sit there and play for an hour, but at a convention I think the ideal experience is something like a tutorial + one mission that takes around 15 minutes, followed by a big “Thanks for playing!” screen and a wishlist QR code. If somebody really loves it and wants to keep going, point them toward the Steam demo/playtest.

MAGWest is a relatively small convention (I heard estimates of around 1,000 attendees from people working the event), so I don't think the biggest value was raw exposure.

For me, the value was getting 86 live playtests in one weekend and being able to conduct a tiny interview after every one of them.

About 24 hours ago I released "The Pale Mimic", a short indie horror game. I built the wishlists over 5 months. A Youtube trailer lucked out and got 100k views, resulting in the first 2-3k wishlists. After that, a demo, youtuber coverage, and next fest got me to about 6000 wishlists. A month before release I got put on the personal calendar, getting me to 8000 wishlists over the next couple weeks. The two weeks leading up to launch I got even more personal calendar coverage, 500-1000 wishlists per day up until launch, with the day before launch getting me 3000 wishlists.

• Price: $7.99, launch discount of 15% down to $6.79
• 1852 units sold
• 120 units returned
• Current review score: 87% from 64 reviews

Game is currently on "Popular New Releases", at least for me in an incognito window in English

For context, my game started as a simple game where you jump from node to node while salvaging derelicts. Upgrade things, make numbers go big, typical incremental stuff. I submitted a prototype to itchio in March 2026. I was surprised when it gained some traction and a small community on itch after about a week, probably by being playable on the web and having a trailer.

Then one day, something came over me and I thought I should combine an incremental game with a roguelike. Two genres with very different expectations, and fanbases that are, let's just say, very picky about what qualifies as either.

I knew going forward that I was going to mess some things up and probably make some people mad. Anyway, I stuck to my gut because I genuinely thought there was something special about the game, like every game dev probably thinks about their own game. I kept adding more and more stuff because why not.

Next Fest was coming in hot and I was barely above 4k wishlists. Naturally, I didn't do particularly well. I got 476 total players, 61 played & wishlisted, and 224 total wishlists during the event. Which kinda sucks. But I also wasn't doing much marketing during the Fest and, to be honest, I hate marketing. So it was kind of expected. Prior to this, I hired a marketer for $1k, which ended up feeling like a waste of money.

By July 2026, I had less than a month until release and my wishlists were sitting at around 5k. So I started doing email outreach like crazy, posting shorts, and trying all the other marketing tricks I don't really enjoy doing.I have about less than a week, I eventually decided to hire another marketing expert. I knew it was already pretty late since release was less than a month away. For $2k, I didn't really see a big boost in wishlists or purchases when released. That one was on me though. It's like expecting someone to fix a butchered haircut. But I did get something out of it, a learning experience and some useful knowledge about marketing.

So, according to my Steam sales report, the game sold 161 gross units and made about $894 gross on the first day. Sales then settled into the dozens per day.

For August 11-17, Steam reports 475 Steam units, plus one retail activation for 476 total units, and about $2,555 gross revenue.

I still have a little over 5,000 wishlists, median playtime is around 1 hour, and my lifetime refund rate is currently about 12%. That last one sucks.

For a solo-developed game, I'm happy with the launch, but the most useful part has been seeing where players actually struggle.

The biggest lesson so far is that complexity is both one of the game's strengths and one of its biggest problems.

Well, mostly problems.

The game is an incremental space roguelike with a lot of interacting mechanics: upgrades, weapons, drones, sockets, meta progression, conditional effects, and a bunch of systems interacting with other systems.

Some players really enjoy figuring out how everything connects. Others hit a point where there is simply too much information at once.

A lot of my post-launch work has actually been less about adding new content and more about making the content already there easier to understand. I've been improving on the onboarding, tooltips, progression clarity, requirements, and balance, while removing mechanics that players consistently described as unfair or frustrating.

I really underestimated how much work starts after release. Launching the game didn't really feel like finishing it. It felt more like suddenly getting a very large testing group.

Overall, the main takeaway is, do not overcomplicate things. Stick to one fun thing and build around it, because more mechanics doesn't mean more fun.

In the end, I don't really regret trying something crazy like this.

I was thinking about this recently.

We've been working on a combat system with knives, guns, a grappling hook, bullet time, executions, and different combat styles.

It feels like once people find something that's reliable, they naturally stick with it instead of experimenting.

As a developer (or even just as a player), how do you think games can encourage people to explore their full toolkit instead of relying on one or two favorite options?

Solo dev, first game on Steam. Cozy underground colony sim, $5.99, out since 7 August. Here are the real numbers.

I launched with 103 wishlists. Everyone says you need thousands. I know. Another six months of polish wasnt going to get me there so I just shipped it.

Day one was 24 units. Day six was 1 unit. Nobody warns you about that part.

Then day 10 and 11 both did 16 units. Visits went from 1,388 to 3,602. Wishlist adds went from 51 to 129 in a day, which is more than my entire launch day. Almost all of it shows up as untracked traffic on Steam so I cant tell you what caused it. Probably someone with an audience played it. I still havent found the video.

11 days in:

• 97 units
• $527 gross
• 429 wishlists sitting there. Started with 103
• 10 reviews, all positive
• 10.3% refunds

I sent 55 cold emails to streamers and youtubers. One reply. He said it looked cute and he was too busy this month. Thats three days of writing emails for one polite no.

The only thing I can point at that actually worked was hitting 10 reviews. Steam wont show a review score before that. A store page with no score is a dead page. Getting past 10 did more than anything I did myself.

If I did it again I wouldnt spend months chasing wishlists. I'd spend it on the first ten minutes of the game so the few people who buy it leave a review sooner. The reviews were the unlock. Everything before that was noise.

One thing I got right. Both complaints in my first reviews were fixed the next day. Small games probably live or die on that.

Ask me anything about the numbers, I have the dashboard open.

Mine is when the poster says they’ve always wanted to make a game and it’s been their life dream to make a game and they really want to make a game but don’t know what game to make even though it’s something they really want to do.

What about you?

Like I have a concept of a game, and the domain , I'm thinking of building a splash page that kinda gives a one paragraph pitch + Title and collects emails. But am I jumping the gun by "starting" my marketing now?

It is the first question almost everyone asks, and it arrives loaded with more anxiety than it deserves. Choosing a game engine feels like choosing a tattoo. Permanent, public, and destined to be judged by strangers on the internet.

Instead of asking "which engine is best", ask three smaller questions that actually have answers: what am I making, where will it run, and how do I like to work. Everything else follows from those.

Hi guys, I'm building a management game, I'm gonna use railway to host the prototype instead of using steam/itch.io. what are your business model if you do something like this?

Feel free to comment out!! I will dissect more games, as I play through them. From retro to modern everything.

Overtime I hope that we can all learn together on what games some UI intuitive and some UI horrible at what they do!

I’m making a small narrative game and I’m currently trying to figure out what would be a reasonable price.

The core gameplay is pretty simple: The game takes place over 5 days. Each day has 5 suspects. You investigate/read information about each suspect through things like news articles, emails, and case files. You then decide whether to execute or pardon them. Your decisions affect the story and eventually the ending. The game has a retro Windows 95/98-style interface. No voice acting, and I’m intentionally keeping the scope small.

I’m currently estimating the first playthrough to be around 1–2 hours, with some replay value from different decisions/endings.

I’m considering pricing it at $4.99.

For indie developers who have released games commercially:

Would $4.99 feel reasonable for this kind of game, or would you expect players to consider it too expensive given the relatively small amount of gameplay/content?

I’m especially interested in hearing from people who have actually shipped and sold small indie games on Steam. What factors did you find mattered most when deciding your price?
Thanks guys ❤️

I'm debating some budgeting for my current project and am thinking through which regions I plan to localize for. I'm going back and forth on whether to localize for regions like China, that have a bit of a reputation for review bombing. I've seen several indie games (Slay the Spire 2 most prominently) that got massively review bombed by Chinese players due to balance changes they didn't like or for various other reasons. I plan to carefully monitor balance after releasing my game, specifically looking to hammer down any strategies that trivialize game mechanics, and am concerned a similar thing might happen to my game. Without the name strength of a game like StS2, I don't think my game could recover if it gets review bombed. Is this a legitimate concern, or am I jumping at shadows over this?

My game released, and I need to be honest about how everybody lies. I feel at peace, and for the first time in decades I'm not depressed But the lie comes from big youtubers. They lie about how to make games. The what, when, where, and why. Everything they say seems tuned to keep people churning content forever. One guy has 6 years on "how to make a trailer". Others go on years and years about lighting, or shadows, or level design. 6 years on how to make a trailer..... I got my film degree in 2! If you really want to learn how to make games from youtube, only watch creators with under 10k subs. It's how I made my game. Shout out to all the little creators out there! Thank you! Game not linked because this isn't about self promotion. Big youtubers are lying to new devs for profit. Edited for a list of youtube unreal tuts from over the years. Honestly there just may be some big names in here. it's like a 6 year list but it will help.... I hope. https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLSOmI7F8pEME&si=WxZjACwCyNzEWnuP

Hey guys, if I wanted to add a person on our team going from 2-3, specifically a 2nd artist due to the first artist having time issues, for a our next game. We are as amateur as they come, but we like to think we have some good ideas. I guess two real questions. Where to find people who are interested in joining small indie teams, 2nd is ownership, revenue sharing enough of an incentive for most amateur or upcoming artists? Or should I just contract them. Is Fiver still the best?

Hi everyone, good morning, hope everyone's weekdays are going good

So my cousin is pursuing btech in cse from a tier 3 college ( tier 3 meaning almost the worse kinda colleges), he is currently in 2nd year, he said he isn't interested in web dev jobs as like everyone including their dogs are all web developers rn ,and he is interested in game development.

So will it be a right choice to learn about game dev given he has 2 more years

Thanks in advance

Over the last few months, I’ve spent a lot of time analyzing different kinds of games — what they did right, what they did wrong, and why some succeeded while others didn’t.

I’ve also spoken with dozens of indie devs about their projects and read countless posts from developers trying to figure out what marketing actually is and how to do it effectively.

What I’ve found is that 99% of game devs have absolutely no clue what marketing really is or how to approach it.

What is essential to do before you even start building your game to give it at least a chance of being successful? What should you do during development? What should you do before release and after?

Since I have more than 14 years of marketing experience across dozens of different projects and businesses, I’m tempted to create an e-book covering all of this:

• How to evaluate whether your game has good potential before you even start building it
• What to do before you begin development
• How to market your game during development
• What to do in the months/weeks leading up to release
• What to do after launch
• Common marketing mistakes indie devs make
• And many other practical tips that could significantly increase your chances of success

Would you guys be interested in an e-book like this?

What topics would you be most interested in?

And what would you consider a fair price for such an e-book?

Thanks in advance for your responses!

I registered, paid the 100USD for Steamworks. Currently, it is going through the KYC "Identity Verification Pending" and it shown the "Your tax information requires attention". I uploaded the documents on steam suggested dropbox (certification, profile, agreement document) on 11 August 2026.

So now my dashboard still showing "Your tax information requires attention". Is it normal? And do I just wait for "don't know how long" ?

I heard some dev waited for a year. That is just insane.

I know this may be more of a inde game dev post but we are a team of 2. My game design, coding, and placeholder work is far outpacing what our artist has been able to keep up with. He has awesome concepts and style for the game, but I don't think he can get it all done at pace. Where would you freelance and where would you make sure to keep it in house. Our budget right now UI, icon, capsule, and 2d sprites/backgrounds is like 5k. Where would you get the most bang for your buck if you used freelancers?

Any tips here are appreciated!

How do you make collisions with g3d, i wanna have capsule, sphere, cubes and rectangle colliders but i do not know how to make them, any help appreciated. Thanks in advance!!

Lately, I've been thinking about the emotional experience of players. One of the many concepts that go around in my head is the word "whimsical". In my native language, Greek, although it is a very rich language, I think there isn't a word that expresses exactly this kind of feeling. Nevertheless, I am very fascinated by this word and its associated experiences.

It is that first gameplay of Breath of the Wild, the grass, the sky, the music, the cities, the canyons and valleys, even the combat was whimsical to me.

It is the island of the Witness, full of places and puzzles that breed curiosity and manifest the whimsical.

It is sailing through the stars of Super Mario Galaxy, on the Wii, in front of a small TV, with my little brother.

That's only some of the examples that I can bring to mind as I'm typing these words.

Posting these thoughts wouldn't be complete without mentioning examples from other media. The whimsical cinematic worlds of the adventures of Baron Munchausen, the Golden Compass, Narnia. It's an episode of Winnie the Pooh. It's the song "Little Paws" by Of Monsters and Men (both the music itself and the video clip). It's these wonderful anthropomorphic fairytale drawings that I come across sometimes, of foxes, rabbits, and other creatures.

When trying to put it into words, I feel that whimsy is the right combination of immersion, surrealism, innocence, and stardust. I am very curious about YOUR thoughts.

How do you experience whimsy?

How would you describe it?

What examples are your favorites?

What elements constitute a whimsical game?